has an interview on youtube (well, I assume it’s an interview – only his responses are shown). Here’s a transcript, with some commentary by me, and no doubt other comments will be forthcoming 🙂
In Darwins’ day we knew very little about cellular chemistry, for one thing, we knew very little about metabolism, about how cells go about making the chemicals that they need to make the big, the big parts of living cells. We now understand that in some detail, we also understand about the proteins that do the chemistry of life. These are called enzymes. We understand how large these enzymes are. We understand that they are encoded by genes, and we understand how that encoding takes place, that’s called the genetic code. So, really, you put all that together, we now understand something about digitally encoded information, in cells, encoded in the genome, we understand why it’s there, to code proteins, and how the proteins function to do the chemistry of life. And we also have the ability to measure, to some degree, how much information is there.
All true, and clearly stated. No issue from me there.
If you put all that together, we know see something that looks very much like human designs where we use digitally encoded information to accomplish things
Well, maybe. A little. One huge difference is that biological “designs” are self-reproducing organisms, and so far human designs are resolutely non-self-reproducing. In fact, the obvious answer to the alien who finds a watch on a heath, and wonders if it was designed or not, is: “well, does it reproduce?” If yes, it is probably biological. If no, it’s probably designed by a person. But I’ll grant Axe his digitality – yes, nucleotides are discrete, and yes, their sequence is determines results in the cell products that go to make cells into reproducing organisms (and reproducing cells within organisms, of course.)
But after this excellent, clearly well informed and well-articulated start, he then adds a comment of mind-boggling ignorance:
and we know that it’s impossible to get information on that scale through a chance process that Darwinism employed.
What?
Seriously, Douglas, you are surely not so ignorant of evolutionary theory that you think that Darwin “employed” (proposed?) a “a chance process”? And, if so, what on earth do you mean by “chance”? We know perfectly well that, for example, it is vanishingly unlikely (I’d even be happy to call it “impossible”) that a series of “chance” draws of sequences of nucleotides would result in a sensible genome, but surely you don’t think that that was what Darwin (or at least Darwinists in a post genetic-code-understanding world) was proposing? Nobody that I know of has ever proposed that. And if, Douglas, you are using chance to mean “spontaneous” or “unintended by a designer” – then we simply don’t “know that it’s it’s impossible to get information on that scale”.
In fact we know the opposite – we know that, using precisely the mechanism that Darwin proposed, we can generate highly complex and functional pieces of engineering, so much so that we often use the Darwinian algorithm instead of human beings to solve difficult and complex problems.
So at best there is equivocation here, an equivocation that renders the rest of his pronouncements invalid. But let’s go on:
I remember thinking at the time that this looks like something not just a product of engineering but a product of brilliant engineering, and that was the point where it occurred to me that someone needed to do the experiments to test whether that was really the case or not.
Well, when Axe comes up with a test of the difference between the results of brilliant engineering and the results of a Darwinian algorithm, great. But that’s going to be especially difficult when our most brilliant engineers actually emply Darwinian algorithms to solve the most difficult problems. And when, as yet, except in the context of genetic algorithms we have not even started to design self-replicating machines. My hunch is that when we do, it will be because we have figured out the conditions we need to kick-start chemical self-replication. Which won’t help Axe’s case.
It’s strange how your preconceptions really colour the way you process data, and some people just went along with what they were taught, and I never tend to do that, I was always questioning what I was taught, including Darwinism.
It is indeed, and your preconceptions about what Darwinism actually proposes have clearly coloured yours, Douglas. And I am sure that the many brilliant biologists who have contributed so much to evolutionary theory, like you were always questioning what they were taught, including the theory as it currently stood. That’s why, interestingly, neo-Lamarkcism exists – because people question what they were taught, including Darwinism. iconoclasm isn’t limited to IDists, and iconoclasm is a lot more admirable when you actually understand the icon you are about to clasm.
If you believe that everything was cobbled together through random processes, then there would be a lot of junk, there would be the residue of cobbling sitting there, and that’s why people jumped to this junk DNA hypothesis. They found out that a very small fraction of the genome actually encodes proteins, that was the one aspect of genomes that we understood well, is that they encode proteins, so they assumed that all the rest of it is junk. Well, the truth is, we didn’t know what the rest of it was doing. That doesn’t mean it’s junk, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that in fact it isn’t junk, and that’s a significant prediction – it’s not a prediction that Darwin himself made, but it follows very readily, naturally, from Darwinism, and it turns out not to be correct. And that’s becoming increasingly clear.
Well, this is a lot of junk for sure. Firstly, non-coding sequences were known about long before anyone proposed that some of the genome was “junk”. Secondly, the reason people think some of the genome is “junk” is at least partly because removing great chunks of it makes no difference to the phenotype, and, because some of it clearly consists of genetic sequences that have mutated in such a way that they no longer code for anything. Thirdly, it is not a prediction that “follows very readily, naturally” from Darwinism, although of course the finding of degraded sequences and apparently functionless repeats is readily explained by Darwinism, but it certainly not a prediction of Darwinism. For instance, if it turns out that carrying non-functional nucleotide sequence carries an appreciable metabolic cost (and we don’t know if that is the case, I don’t think), then junk will, per Darwiinism, tend to be “cleaned up” over time. So to suggest that the “junk DNA hypothesis” was a prediction of Darwinism, is simply, factually, wrong – historically, and theoretically. It would only be a prediction of Darwinism if there were no conceivable Darwinian mechanism that might tend to clear up the junk, But there is. In contrast, if some of the genome really does turn out to be “junk” (e.g. if it’s removal turns out to have no phenotypic effects whatsoever) then that starts to be a bit of a problem for ID.
But I’ll let Axe worry about that.
An interesting sequence of comments on the Axe thread at UD:
It reveals a very interesting disconnect between the ID and – what do we call it – nonID? positions.
It doesn’t really matter whether we call the putative designer “God” or not – the fact remains that “design” doesn’t function as a default.
If IDists want to propose that biological things were designed, then they need a positive hypothesis – we all do, it’s how science works. As Billmaz says, evolution is the only scientific hypothesis available. Well, no, there’s one more – design by frontloading. It’s the only actually testable (scientifically) hypothesis I know of. But I’ve never seen anything other than preliminary attempts to operationalise and test it. But potentially it could make differential predictions to those of evolution.
Perhaps Axe could have a go – demonstrate that some of that apparently non-functional DNA are actually latent genes that will be triggered into function by appropriate environmental need.
At UD Eric Anderson comments:
No, we don’t “already know this”. What we do know is that the Darwinian algorithm (self-replication with heritable variance in reproductive success) can account for “complex specified information” – even Dembski agrees with this, as far as I can tell, he just thinks that somehow information is “smuggled in” via the fitness function. Well, sure the information is in the fitness function, but the fitness function in the biological world is provided by the environment the population inhabits. So that isn’t a problem. And the Darwinian algorithm isn’t “chance” – it’s stochastic, sure, but that doesn’t mean that the patterns it finds aren’t heavily biased towards those that maximise fitness. On the contrary, that’s precisely what the algorithm ensures. Not only that, but the algorithm can result in “Irreducibly Complex” entities, where “Irreducibly Complex” is defined in any way that Behe has ever defined it.
One problem, I think, is that most IDists aren’t really clear, even to themselves, it seems, what they mean by “chance”. Sometimes it means “non-intentional” (“was it a chance or was it murder?”) Sometimes they mean “spontaneous” (was it planned?) Sometimes they mean “drawn independently a (sometimes flat) probability distribution”.
Yes, the Darwinian algorithm accounts for the spontaneous generation of information, but by that use of the word “chance”, Axe is simply wrong. The only sense of the word in which he is correct is if he uses it to mean “drawn independently from a possibly flat probability distribution” – and we know that such draws are vanishingly unlikely to result in a functional genome. But Darwin did not propose such a thing, nor has anyone else. And if Axe means anything else, then he is incorrect to say that it can’t result in complex information.
And what is sad is the depth of misunderstanding that Eric has regarding evolutionary processes. “Natural selection” is isn’t an agent at all, nor is it claimed to be. It is simply the name Darwin gave, by analogy to “artificial selection” to what must be the case if populations of organisms self-replicate with heritable variation in reproductive success in the current environment, as the most trivial toy evolutionary algorithm will show.
It’s certainly highly stochastic. But if Eric is using the word “chance” to describe any event that happens, then it is also “chance” that makes it more likely that stones will end up at the bottom of the hill than the top. But does anyone deny that this tends to happen? Fitness is exactly the same. Given a population of self-replicators that replicate with heritable variation in reproductive success in that environment, then that population will evolve to become fitter in that environment. Yes, it’s a stochastic process, but nobody has shown that such processes, with those givens, can’t produce complex information, and many people (myself even) have shown that it can.
Why should we? Evolutionary theory only explains how complex life forms will emerge from simple self-replicators. It doesn’t explain how self-replicators emerged from non-self-replicators; it doesn’t explain how the universe came to be. It is certainly true that methodological naturalism is the only game in science, but that doesn’t mean that scientists have to assume that the material is all there is – it’s just all they have the tools to reveal.
I’ll propose a rule of thumb: the more dimensions involved in specifying fitness, the greater the advantage of Darwinian processes over typical human engineering.
Sounds reasonable. I think it’s the multidimensional fitness space that confounds people, actually. Because it’s relative easy to visualise 2 and 3D space as actual space, our metaphors can get stuck there.
Lizzie,
Well lots of ID advocates claim to be programmers, and they should be familiar with multidimensionality as a purely mathematical construct. I’ve written javascripts with six dimensional variables. It has nothing to do with space and time. Just the number of independent variables.
The more I look at the ID movement, as represented by Uncommon Descent commenters, the more convinced I become that the conflation between evolutionary theory and Epicurean metaphysics (which is about “chance and necessity”) is central to the entire outlook. And intelligent design’s opposition to that outlook is really no different from the Stoic objections to Epicurean metaphysics — that chance and necessity cannot have generated functional complexity.
There are a few UD folks who are willing to recognize the distinctions — I say that in deference to the few who look at what’s posted here — but they are few and far between. The “ringleaders” of the movement — Dembski, Douglas Axe, Cornelius Hunter, Berlinski, et al. — make this conflation explicitly (e.g. Dembski’s definition of design as “the set-theoretic complement of chance and necessity”).
And I believe that this conflation of evolutionary theory and Epicurean metaphysics is actually quite central to the emotional core of the cultural-political dimension of the ID movement — it is that conflation which allows evolutionary theory to be the scapegoat for capitalism, technology, bureaucratization of everyday life, and so on.
This is not to say that proponents of evolutionary theory are not guilty of the same error — it’s been a vocal strand of expositions of the theory all along, with Huxley, Monod, Provine, Dawkins, and Lewontin standing out as the most egregious examples — and, not coincidentally, also the very same folks who are constantly quoted, over and over and over again, at Uncommon Descent. (Well, not Huxley and Monod, but the point stands.)
Kantian Naturalist,
Monad’s book is quite sane considering it was written before Henry Morris.
I liked Monod’s book, but I do think the title has had a long and dark shadow.
That’s an interesting suggestion, Lizzie. What did you have in mind by “long and dark shadow”?
This is true – it’s a high level metaphor, and a misleading one in some ways.
This is a false dichotomy. Chance and Force are not different kinds of causation. “Chance” is simply the name we sometimes give to events that we have not predicted – that are not part of our predictive model. We can expand our model to include more events that we hitherto regarded as “Chance”.
So we are left with Forces, modelled and unmodelled. But we do not have to explain all events at the level of basic forces – we can derive higher level laws, such as the gas laws, that allow us to talk about “pressure” and “heat” as causal agents. Similarly we can talk about fitness as an attractor. And fitness is the attractor that results in populations of self-replicators (as long as they replicate with heritable variance in reproductive success) to evolve along a dimension, not simply drift “randomly”.
Sure. It’s a good one. See above. But most things can be predicted, at least statistically and in controlled conditions.
No, it isn’t. There is a perfectly real force there, just as air pressure exerts a real force, even though it is the result of unpredictable i.e. chance movements of air molecules. Evolution is just the same – it’s stochastic, like brownian motion, but statistically predictable, therefore, as per Eric’s own definition, not chance.
Not at all: see above.
Eric missed a bit: Stuff does indeed happen, but it happens in statistically predictable ways. And one of these ways is that if the Stuff happens to consist of populations of self-replicators that self-replicate with heritable variance in reproductive success in the current environment, variants that replicate the most efficiently will become the most prevalent, and the population will become more fit. This is a pretty good Law of Nature.